{"id":41,"date":"2004-07-03T00:22:55","date_gmt":"2004-07-03T05:22:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chappells.biz\/blog\/?p=41"},"modified":"2006-02-06T18:25:57","modified_gmt":"2006-02-06T23:25:57","slug":"the-lion-sleeps-tonight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chappells.us\/blog\/the-lion-sleeps-tonight\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lion Sleeps Tonight"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Back during Napster&#8217;s golden age I got hooked on finding as many versions as possible of certain old songs. One was Ghost Riders. Another was The Lion Sleeps Tonight, which I discovered was actually an old South African song that became the pop hit I listened to on AM Radio when rock&#8217;n&#8217;roll (and I) was young. So it was interesting to run across <a href=\"http:\/\/bgbg.blogspot.com\/2004\/07\/now-ill-have-it-stuck-in-my-head-all.html\">an article in Bag and Baggage<\/a> about Solomon Linda, the Zulu migrant worker who composed the song Mbube (lion) in Johannesburg in 1939 and recorded it with a  group called the Evening Birds; and about how folk singer Pete Seeger came across the song in 1949 and performed it, calling it Wimoweh, from the Zulu &#8220;uyiMbube&#8221; meaning &#8220;he is a lion&#8221;; then done by the Tokens (the version I listened to as a youth) in 1961, who added the lyrics &#8220;in the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight&#8221;. After all these years, Linda&#8217;s heirs are suing Disney for royalties on account of using the song in Lion King.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The history behind those songs I listened to on AM radio in the late 50&#8217;s and early 60&#8217;s never ceases to amaze me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","comment-closed"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chappells.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chappells.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chappells.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chappells.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chappells.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/chappells.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chappells.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chappells.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chappells.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}